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- LONDON - Flowers could soon have custom-made scents that are designed
to calm people.
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- Natalia Dudareva, an assistant professor
at Purdue University in Indiana, claims to have discovered how plants create
scent. She now hopes to be able to modify them genetically to produce flowers
with enhanced scents.
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- She says mass breeding programmes for
flowers have diminished their scent.
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- "Breeders are now going all out
for size, color and shelf life. Scent is not important to them and we have
seen flower scents suffer as a result " it's almost as if scent has
been bred out. The breeders are not sure what has happened," she says.
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- Dudareva discovered that scents are made
up of volatile compounds " essential oils that evaporate in warm weather.
However, the number of compounds in each flower varies dramatically.
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- "We began looking at the snapdragon,
which has a scent made up of only seven volatile compounds," she says.
"This is probably one of the easiest scents to look at. At the other
end of the scale is an orchid, which has over 100 different compounds in
its scent.
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- "Every plant has its own scent signature
and we are only just beginning to work out what they are. Once we know
that, we can look for the genetic codes that trigger scent production and
work out exactly what is going on."
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- Russian-born Dudareva, who has been studying
scents for five years, used to work at the University of Michigan where
she set up the world's first scent laboratory. She now has a second lab
at Purdue.
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- "The process of analysing a scent
is time-intensive and we know very little about what scents are actually
used for by plants," she says.
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- "To capture a scent, the flower
is first encased in a pressurized plastic bag and the scent distilled.
When placed under a mass spectrometer, the compounds within the scent can
be identified."
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- Her team has already begun producing
several volatile compounds in small quantities and soon hopes to begin
building artificial scents. However, the ultimate goal is to modify plants
genetically to form new scents naturally.
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- "Eventually there is no reason why
we can't alter the plant's scent dramatically by altering the quantities
of the different compounds produced," says Dudareva.
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- "What we can't do is make them produce
new compounds, but this is not too much of a drawback, as with some you
have 100 compounds to play with anyway."
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- Dudareva hopes to create custom scents
based on aromatherapy research.
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- "Aromatherapy is obviously a big
market for this," she says. "Imagine having a flower in your
office that releases a calming scent during the day. Once we know how the
scents are produced and can alter them, this is a relatively straightforward
application.
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- "We have already begun to study
the aromatherapy market with a view to producing some specially scented
plants, although we are probably at least a year away from that."
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- The team is also hoping its work could
have practical uses in controlling the pollination rates of plants.
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- "We know that pollination relies
a lot on scent. By altering scents, we should be able to change the rate
at which they pollinate," says Dudareva.
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- "For instance, we could alter plants
needed by Third World countries, making them produce far more pollination
scent, thereby reproducing at a faster rate.
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- "This could also obviously be used
the other way " to limit reproduction. We could produce a kind of
natural scent-based pesticide that stops plants reproducing."
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- Dudareva's work has also given the team
an insight into the way plants work. For instance, while studying snapdragon
scents, it was discovered that the plant was producing far more scent during
the day.
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- Several researchers have also discovered
links between plants that prove scent is used to communicate.
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- "If a virus infects a plant, it
can release a scent warning its neighbors, telling them to put up defenses,"
Dudareva says.
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- "Nobody knows what other uses scent
has, and we hope to find that out."
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